Defining the Madness

Today I’ve queued up a pithy piece which is inspired by the uproarious Glossary in my main man Dennard Dayle’s brilliant story collection Everything Abridged.

Amran: An amalgamation of the Indian, Arabic, and Hebrew versions of the name Amram, which nobody knows how to pronounce.

AR-15: What Jesus needed in the early thirties.

Bitcoin: Still useless, and now available as an ETF.

Books: Paper-based objects used as accessories in Reels and TikToks.

Children: Organisms genetically engineered to trigger your deepest-seated traumas.

Condominiums: Where rubes and plebes cohabitate in misery and insolvency.

Conspiracy theorists, critical thinkers, crypto bros, and culture warriors: The wind in this publication’s sails.

Darwinian competition: 1. (in the natural world) Kill or be killed. 2. (in the business world) Kill or extract rents through corporate lobbying, wage suppression, and tax avoidance.

Democracy: A cool theory.

DeSantis, Ron: 2024’s Scott Walker.

Economics: Psychology, but with cherry-picked data, racist undertones, and the undeserved legitimacy afforded by calculus.

Election: See: Performance art.

Erection: The root cause of billions of problems.

Field research: What transpires when a washed, ethnically ambiguous, middle-aged rando ventures into the wasteland and engages in culture war combat with preposterous politicians, bigoted boomers, and feral first-graders.

Fuck: The British Empire’s most durable export.

Godzilla: The hero humanity deserves.

Gowani: The surname of some deadbeat from Pakistan.

GZA: Should be your favorite MC.

History: Insufficiently studied, easily retconned.

Hypocrisy: Fueling election campaigns for 2,500 years.

Inertia: Why the world keeps passing you by.

Instincts: Untrustworthy.

Jealousy: The first motivational tool.

Junk bonds: The foundation of American exceptionalism.

Kleptocracy: Applied democracy.

Kompromat: Explains the past seven decades of U.S. foreign policy.

Leverage: 1. (in finance) If you’re worried about it, you’re fucked. 2. (in negotiations) If your counterparty has it, you’re fucked. 3. (in geopolitics) If your enemies exploit it, you’re fucked. 4. (in art) The not coincidental title of my kickass, hopefully-soon-to-be-sold-to-a-dying-publishing-house debut novel.

Literary agents: 1. Malevolent vampires entrenched within a fundamentally broken business model. 2. Essential champions for marketing- and math-challenged authors.

Marijuana: 1. The gateway drug jeopardizing western civilization. 2. The perfect way to fund those pension liabilities.

MBAs: Weapons of mass destruction.

National championship: Life-shortening immortality.

Nihilism: What follows your libertarian phase.

Organic chemistry: Stalingrad for pre-meds.

Orgasms: Physical convulsions faked for hundreds of thousands of years.

Performance art: See: Election.

Platform: 1. (in publishing) A place online for authors to promote books. 2. (in technology) A place online for dipshits to promote eugenics.

Politicians: The epitome of adverse selection.

QAnon: An evidence-free conspiracy theory created by Charlie Brown, incel progenitor.

Quotidian: Defies its definition.

Revanchism: America’s favorite pastime.

RZA: Produced the beats of my youth.

Securities and Exchange Commission: Spineless, toothless, and useless.

Sentience: 1. An amorphous, ill-defined concept best discussed while intoxicated. 2. What tech bros conflate with autocomplete.

Taiwan: A plucky island nation threatened by and dependent upon cynical superpowers.

Trampolines: Lead generators for the healthcare industrial complex.

Utilitarianism: White savior complex times infinity.

Uzbekistan: Bet you can’t find it on a map.

Vasectomies: The ultimate pain relievers.

Vigilantism: Life doesn’t imitate art.

Walker, Scott: 2015’s Ron DeSantis.

Writing: One of humanity’s least profitable ideas.

World War III: Coming soon to a theater near you.

X: Twitter, but less solvent and more antisemitic.

Xenophobia: The only incurable fear.

Yemen: Casualty of proxy war.

Yes men people: How the dumbest, most venal men people achieve power.

Zimmer, Hans: The only film score composer you can name.

Zoos: Mass extinction’s final frontier.